The Life of Thomas Hardy (Brennecke)/Chapter 9
CHAPTER IX
The Cosmic Poet (1903-1908)
THE opening years of the present century witnessed the fulfilment of a project that had long been in the stage of fermentation in Hardy's mind. For many years he had quietly nursed the ambition of presenting an epic treatment of the Napoleonic conflict that should adequately show England's share in that struggle against the world-tyranny of an autocratic military genius. But, exercising that restraint which is so characteristic of genius, he deferred the execution of this plan until he had won at least some recognition as a poet with his first two volumes of verse. Two years after Poems of the Past and the Present had been launched against a world of readers still sceptical of the poet's powers and equipment, appeared Part One of The Dynasts. The title had been chosen from a phrase out of the Magnificat, which is echoed in the final chorus of Pities in Part III: "Who hurlest Dynasts from their thrones." A footnote gives the Greek of the original: "χαθετλε ΔΥΝΑΣΤΑΣ ἀπὸ θρόνων."
Much as Hardy's late turn to poetry had surprised his readers, no one was prepared to receive this stupendous torso in 1903 without feeling profound astonishment at the resourcefulness, daring or imbecility of the veteran author—particularly as the title-page announced that the completed work would consist of "three parts, nineteen acts, and one hundred and forty scenes." Such gigantic proportions were unexpected in the declining years of even such a giant as Thomas Hardy. The preface, the list of characters, the dramatic form, the supernatural machinery, and, above all, the portentous opening:
What of the Immanent Will and its designs?
were calculated to fill the gentle reader with nothing short of consternation and dismay—and they did; they still do. Reviewers very seldom got beyond expressions of petulant amazement before the ends of their articles. They scarcely recovered in time to notice the delightful scenes on the Wessex coast and the glorious depiction of Trafalgar, so absorbed were they in the provokingly philosophical "anatomy of the Immanent Will."
Part II, dealing with Napoleon's successful continental campaigns and with the English victories in the Peninsula, followed in 1906; and Part III, concerned with the disasters of Moscow and Waterloo, completed the trilogy in 1908. By this time the more discriminating readers and the less prejudiced critics had begun to discern signs of real greatness in the work. It was seen to be a magnum opus and not a monstrosity. Although it has received extravagant praise since then, sometimes from authorities of eminence, it is still comparatively unknown.
It is interesting to note the gradual conversion of its critics from frank hostility to warm approval and some measure of enthusiasm. When Part I appeared, there was, as Alfred Noyes put it, "a general disposition among critics to 'hum' and 'ha.'" "The furtive yelp of the masked and writhing poeticule"—as another Victorian poet exuberantly described it—"did not fail, however, to testify to the real greatness of the strange intruder." The change in the attitude of reviewers from disapprobation and dismay at the immense proportions, the mighty themes, and the iconoclastic methods of the work, to sympathy and understanding, draws the attention of the investigator immediately. In the London Nation, for instance, the review of the first part was frankly hostile. Mr. Hardy was brusquely ordered to return to novel-writing—being definitely pigeonholed in which field, presumably, he would be powerless to annoy the critic with fresh demands upon the intellect or imagination. The remarks which appeared in the same periodical after the publication of the third part, are worth repeating as an admirable summary of the course of critical opinion during the four years which intervened between the publication of the first and last sections.
The elements composing this masterwork had been developing in the mind of the author for a long time. As early as June 20,1875, we find that he entered in his notebook the suggestion that he might attempt "An Iliad of Europe from 1789 to 1815." Five years later we find him writing The Trumpet-Major, in which he used the grim background of the war as an effective foil to the gay and mellow portrayal of an idyllic but pathetic love-story. Here we find such martial touches as the great review of King George's legions on the Wessex Downs, the false alarm of Bonaparte's invasion of the island, and the glorious news of Trafalgar. Especially interesting and effective is the introduction of the author's kinsman, Sir Thomas Masterman Hardy, as a character into the story. All these influences excite and move the unimportant and peaceful country people "as a groundswell moves the weeds in a cave." Among the shorter tales that were written during the latter part of his fiction period, there are several that bear testimony to the increasing insistence with which this favorite theme cried for expression. A Committee-Man of "The Terror" deals with the earlier French Revolution, with the action taking place in England; The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion is a tragic tale of the Heimweh of George's foreign troops; and A Tradition of 1804, told in dialect by old Solomon Selby, a one-time smuggler, recounts the actual landing of "Boney," "the Corsican ogre," in the night with a French officer, to discover a suitable place on the Wessex coast for the landing of his army of invasion.
Parallel to this gradual development of interest in the subject, and, one may reasonably suppose, the accumulation of a great amount of historical and legendary material, there developed in the poet's mind a conception of history—indeed of all human activity—as the manifestation of one mysterious immanent causality, which is finally termed "Will." This philosophical concept is made the intellectual basis by which the historical events are interpreted, and is invested with a lyric and dramatic machinery of its own.
Why Hardy chose the form of a gigantic poetic drama instead of that of the historical romance or of the epic poem is a question that the critic must answer as best he can. The best point of departure for a discussion of Hardy in his new role of dramatist is undoubtedly the set of his own opinions delivered to the Pall Mall Gazette in August, 1892. William Archer in an article in the Fortnightly Review had urged the desirability of a reunion between literature and the drama; had suggested that living novelists were to blame for the poor quality of the writing for the stage of the time, and that they owed it to themselves and to literature to make some essay in dramatic form. Thereupon the Pall Mall Gazette invited the leading novelists to answer these questions:
- Whether you regard the present divorce of fiction from the drama as beneficial or inimical to the best interests of literature and the stage;
- Whether you, yourself, have at any time had, or now have, any desire to exercise your gifts in the production of plays as well as of novels; and, if not,
- Why you consider the novel the better or more convenient means of bringing your ideas before the public you address.
Hardy's reply reads as follows:
- Inimical to the best interests of the stage: no injury to literature.
- Have occasionally had a desire to produce a play, and have, in fact, written the skeletons of several. Have no such desire in any special sense just now.
- Because, in general, the novel affords scope for getting nearer to the heart and meaning of things than does the play: in particular the play as nowadays conditioned, when parts have to be moulded to actors, not actors to parts; when managers will not risk a truly original play; when scenes have to be arranged in a constrained and arbitrary fashion to suit the exigencies of stage-building, although spectators are absolutely indifferent to order and succession, provided they can have set before them a developing thread of interest. The reason of this arbitrary arrangement would seem to be that the presentation of human passions is subordinated to the presentation of mountains, cities, clothes, furniture, plate, jewels, and other real and sham-real appurtenances, to the neglect of the principle that the material stage should be a conventional or figurative arena, in which accessories are kept down to the plane of mere suggestion of place and time, so as not to interfere with the high-relief of the action and emotions.
To the student of The Dynasts this is very interesting. Hardy betrayed here a real interest in the drama and asserted that he had made occasional essays in the form. The field was not new to him, then. Of the many dramatizations of the novels he was probably responsible for at least one, The Three Wayfarers, a one-act pastoral play adapted from The Three Strangers, in Wessex Tales. What he objected to was the restriction imposed upon the dramatist by the external demands of the stage-technique of the day. The writing of The Dynasts showed no deviation from the principles here enunciated. No reliance was placed upon the powers of stage-craft to reproduce the desired setting; the imagination of the reader was assumed to be able to cope with the problem of adequate visualization of the scenes.
Even before the publication and actual production of The Dynasts, Hardy's dramatic talents occasionally revealed themselves. Commentators on the novels noted that the Wessex countrymen often played the part of chorus to the tragedy enacted. This was felt particularly in such a book as The Return of the Native, where the rustics not only assemble for their quasi-pagan bonfire festival and introduce the audience to the atmosphere and characters of the story to come, but also indulge in a wild sort of choric dance. Likewise Aunt Drusilla in Jude is essentially a chorus-figure in her comments on the action. The author prefixed a list of dramatis persona to A Pair of Blue Eyes, and the essential "dramatic unities" were observed in nearly all of the greater prose-tragedies.
In certain of the lyric poems also, we can detect a strong predilection for the drama. Hardy's liking for the dramatic monologue has already been touched upon. Friends Beyond with its ghostly but nevertheless very human characters, and Winter in Durnover Field, with its bird-speakers, are delightful essays in the form of the lyric "mime." The lure of the stage is the prime motive of the action of The Noble Lady's Tale. It is possible then, to assert with some show of reason that Hardy was not a bungling and untried novice in the field of the drama, even though he did not at first intend ever to have The Dynasts actually presented before an audience, even in part.
Nothing exactly like The Dynasts in form has ever been written before. Any analysis of the work, no matter from what point of view, must take cognizance of the fact that, as it stands, it is a unification of two great themes, the War and the Will,—and that this dualism in idea or content has caused a corresponding dualism in form, machinery, and even expression. First there is the human story—the historical drama—with its human agents, motives, and actions, playing upon the stage of Europe. Surrounding and permeating this clash of peoples and ideals there is the philosophical action, with its machinery of allegorical figures, playing in an "Overworld," in the unlimited universe of pure Idea. The first element in the Epic-Drama finds expression in the dialect, prose, or blank verse of the human actors and in the Hardyan prose of the stage-directions and "dumb shows"; the second element is presented through exceedingly various types of lyric measures, punctuated occasionally by the "familiar" prose of the Spirit Ironic. The dramatis personæ of the terrestrial action consist of kings, princes, councillors, generals, admirals, armies, common people, messengers, mobs,—humanity in all its aspects; the supernatural actors are the Ancient Spirit of the Years, the Shade of the Earth, the Spirit of the Pities, the Spirits Sinister and Ironic, spirit messengers, rumors, and recording angels, and choruses of the Years, Pities, and Sinister and Ironic spirits. The resources of typography are employed to make clear to the reader the difference in atmosphere. The poetry declaimed by the spirits is italicized, the dialogue of mortals is printed in the ordinary open-face type, and the stage-directions for both the actions is in small type, which frequently produces a very real and significant effect of uncanny aloofness, as when we are told that the peals of bells are heard faintly by the supernatural spectators. The point of view of the audience, or reader, which is usually also that of the spirits as well, is shifted about with complete freedom. The action of the humans is observed from the most convenient point, whether that be close to the scene, or so far on high that all of Europe can be taken in at a glance.
Even as Homer's gods often intermingled with the mortal heroes in their struggles, so do Hardy's abstractions occasionally interfere with the human action, usually causing some little annoyance to the reader if he is logical-minded. It is indeed in the welding together or in the combination of the two actions or viewpoints in the book that the greatest difficulties are encountered. Mr. Gosse, and many a critic after him, found it hard at times to reconcile the attitude towards life expressed by the spirits (reminding him of the refrain of a popular coster-song: "What's the use of anything?" "Why, nothink!") with the motivation of the mortal characters according to the dictates of the doctrine of complete free-will.
The particular "Epic-Drama" form of The Dynasts is an original invention with Hardy; yet, before hitting upon it, he must have consciously or unconsciously been influenced by a number of somewhat similar literary monuments produced by great cosmic poets before him. Perhaps his favorite Book of Job suggested something of the idea of having celestial machinery to surround and to account for the course of human events; perhaps the Shakespearean "Histories" fired his ambitions to present England's heroes in the poetical drama of action; perhaps the angelic choruses of Goethe's Faust had something to do with his conception of commenting choruses of spiritual essences and chanting recording angels; perhaps the Prometheus Unbound of Shelley influenced both the form and the "irreconcilable" content of the work. All of these literary progenitors, in fact, can be made to present remarkable similarities in point of view and subject matter in the realm of pure idea, as well as in form and structure, and it is perhaps in conjunction with another work, such as one of these, similar in scope, power and imagination, that the characteristics of The Dynasts can be best studied. None of the works mentioned, however, can vie with the tragedies of Æschylus in the richness of comparative material presented. It would be hard to find two poets, produced by two entirely different civilizations, so closely allied in the problems they choose for treatment and in their manner of treating them, as the Æschylus of Eleusis, Greece, of 460 B.C., and the Thomas Hardy of Dorchester, England, of 1910.
In a previous chapter we have observed how Hardy's enthusiasm and sympathy for the work of the classical tragedians made itself felt throughout his career, and in spite of his avowed repudiation of what he considers the Greek optimism, that "revelling in the general situation." The work of no other English writer of the past generation has so frequently invoked comparison with the ideals of Æschylean tragedy as his. W. S. Durrant, for instance, has pointed out striking and elaborate parallelisms between Jude the Obscure and the work of Æschylus. With reference to the novels only, he says: "To put it briefly, Mr. Hardy is the modern exponent of the guiding principles of ancient Greek tragedy," and he speaks of Jude the Obscure as "nothing less than the product of an intellectual avatar, for surely when the story was conceived, the spirit of Æschylus lived again in Thomas Hardy. Nowhere in the ancient tragedies of the great master is Destiny more relentless in pursuing its victim than in this most modern of tragedies cast in the form of prose narrative." Professor Cunliffe, in writing of The Return of the Native, declares that "Hardy's ideal of literary art is Greek tragedy, and it is an ideal with which, in spite of obvious differences, he has much in common."
It is worth noting, that just as the plays of Æschylus can be said to have been born of the Persian wars, so did Hardy look to the historical and legendary past of his nation for material with which to clothe his ideas. The Persians of Æschylus, therefore, which actually celebrated the early victory of western over eastern civilization in wondrous fashion, may form the subject of a close comparison with The Dynasts, which aimed to celebrate a democratic British victory over the imperialism of Napoleon. But of still greater interest than this comparison, which will be treated in detail in the sequel, is the similarity of the great problems with which both writers were primarily concerned. The late Professor Wheeler, in summing up the inner subject matter of the Greek tragedians, has used expressions which might very well have been written by a reviewer of The Dynasts:
The Greek tragic poets were earnest students of the problems and mysteries of human life. Man's relation to the universe about him, his obligation to the unseen powers which control the universe, his duties to his fellow-beings, the seeming conflicts between human and divine law, all these form the material of the Greek tragedy.
Thomas Hardy as well as Æschylus brooded on the mysteries of life and the world, the general riddle of existence, and the validity of the moral law; and it is striking that after a lapse of twenty-four centuries a work appears similar to an ancient predecessor not only in the treatment of these ideas, but even in the terrestrial and celestial machinery employed for the outward clothing of the problems. When we think of the personified spiritual essences invoked by Hardy and governing his great panoramic show, continually making their presence and influence felt in the action of the human puppets below, we are elevated to the sphere of Æschylus' sublime imagination, where the elemental forces of the universe seem close about us. Both authors dwell among the clouds and, like Socrates, are at home there. Both are actuated by the keenest pity for the wretchedness of human life, and by an overwhelming fear of the unknown and unknowable—the two governing motives of all that is best in tragedy, according to Aristotle. Hardy represents the culmination of an age of scepticism and of the storm and stress of religious doubt, analogous to the age which immediately followed the generation of Æschylus in Greece and was represented by the critical attitude assumed by Euripides in matters of orthodox pagan beliefs. Such an age almost invariably follows a conventionally "romantic" one. Hardy follows Æschylus in sequence of ideas much more naturally than one would expect, considering the lapse of so many centuries.
The very real closeness of Thomas Hardy to the classical ideal in dealing with an epic subject can be observed in the fact that he centers his attention on broad questions of Destiny and Collective Will, viewing individual human suffering sympathetically, but as no more than a by-product. This is an attitude frequently found in classical writers and not always perfectly understood by modern readers. In the Trachinian Women of Sophocles, for instance, one cannot fail to be struck by Heracles' lack of forgiveness for Deianeira and his utter disregard for her feelings, but we may be certain that the members of the Athenian audience did not notice this, with their attention centred in the divine mission of the hero. Likewise in the Æneid, Dido's tragic end, so disturbing to modern notions of the ideal relations between hero and heroine, was probably dwarfed immeasurably in the eyes of the Roman readers by the main consideration of Æneas's fulfilment of Rome's destiny. In like manner when reading The Dynasts one is conscious of the chilling effect which the dominant conception of the Immanent Will has upon the purely human motives introduced into the play. This combination of a typically classical viewpoint with an occasional modern exploitation of sentiment forms indeed one of the outstanding excellences of the work, although the superficial reader may feel it as a dilemma. While Hardy expresses his view of life consciously, definitely, and frankly, Æschylus works more unconsciously and does not force his intellectual convictions to the surface, leaving them rather to be naturally reflected or implied in his work. In this respect the ancient writer is the greater poet.
Hardy and Æschylus are strikingly alike in the way they regard and treat the language they use—and this in spite of the fact that they use widely different languages. Both apply with the greatest freedom the principle of the essential flexibility and fluidity of language. The opinion of the conservative contemporaries of Æschylus as to the language he employed is very amusingly presented in the famous scene of the contest of words between the shades of Euripides and of Æschylus in Aristophanes' Frogs. The method of weighing in a balance single lines of the rival authors is employed in order to determine which of the two writes the weightier verse. Æschylus, of course, is the easy winner—his resounding phrases never fail to send the carefully wrought lines of his younger rival soaring upward. It would be interesting to apply the same comparative test, if that were possible, to lines from the "Overworld" scenes in The Dynasts and the weightiest phrases out of the work of Robert Bridges or William Ernest Henley.
Although Aristophanes himself was strongly prepossessed in favor of the older poet, he could not resist the temptation to ridicule Æschylus' coinage and free compounding of words, and his habitual use of "jawbreakers." One does find an exceptionally large proportion of hapax legomena in Æschylus, even when reading him to-day. In The Dynasts the verse abounds in unusual words, and in usual words used with unusual meanings. There is besides a great deal of ponderosity and what classical scholars call "tragic δγχος."
The reader is forced to hesitate over an unusual turn of language almost as frequently as the ordinary student is compelled to revert to the lexicon in reading Agamemnon. Often a rugged Elizabethan as well as Æschylean splendor is achieved, even though it is coupled with a certain uncouthness that repels those critics to whom the smoothness, polish, and "precious" qualities of Stephen Phillips' verse represent the true poetic gift. An astounding versatility of all kinds of metrical schemes is displayed, ranging from blank verse of a distinctive order to a few very effective samples of the "limerick." It is of course not difficult to find single lines or short passages that are not beyond criticism and, just as in the case of Æschylus, the reader must be prepared to bestow upon the work a reasonable measure of sympathetic attention in order to overcome the difficulties of language for the sake of the very real pleasure which an intelligent reading is bound to provide.
The general formal plan of The Dynasts has a distinct family relationship with that of Greek tragedy. As a trilogy it bears the same sort of resemblance to the classical form that a full-grown lion bears to a kitten. There is in it the same unity of theme and treatment, although greatly enlarged and complicated. Each part is complete in itself, like the separate Greek plays, and yet all three are indissolubly bound together by the absolute identity of the underlying theme and the philosophical background. Here Hardy is much closer to Æschylus than to either Sophocles or Euripides, because the elder dramatist felt the trilogy, and not the single play, as the essential dramatic unit. Nearly all the puzzling critical problems with which the Prometheus Bound is surrounded, and all the misconceptions which have grown up with regard to its ultimate ethical significance, would almost certainly be cleared up if its two companion-plays had come down to us. As the play stands, it is dramatically a small formal unit, but ethically a headless torso. It presents to the audience a truly remarkable πλοχή, or complication, but hardly a shadow of a λύσις, or solution. As tragedy developed after Æschylus, as the importance of the chorus was diminished, as plays became longer because of the extra time thus given for the spoken dialogue itself, and as realism gradually crept in, the single play became the unit, and we find Euripides writing three almost independent plays. Æschylus might be said to have produced three-act tragedies; Euripides, cycles of loosely-connected one-act "social dramas." In its general form The Dynasts is Æschylean, while the works of Ibsen and of the manufacturers of the "wellmade play" are essentially Euripidean. It may remind the reader of the Shakespearean "chronicle-history" type—but "histories," from the lost Fall of Miletus on (which, according to Herodotus, caused an audience of Athenians to burst into tears), could nearly all come under the general heading of "tragedy." Hardy is closer to the Greeks than to modern writers in his lavish use of spectacle. The serious plays of to-day very rarely beguile their audiences with processions, pageants, armies, courts, or battles, but of these things the Greeks were very fond. They were naturally suggested also by the peculiar conditions of the vast open-air Dyonysiac theatre, built into the side of the Acropolis, and by the necessary processional entrance, choral evolutions, and exit of a large and stately chorus.
The function of the chorus when employed in a drama has never materially changed since the time of Æschylus. It has been called "the spectator idealized," but its greatest value, from the playwright's point of view, is that it enables him to reach the audience directly, and to permit the characters he has created to remain themselves. It is the instrument by which the dramatist relays what he considers to be the correct emotional or intellectual reaction to the audience. In The Dynasts the actors themselves merely act—they do not express the author's opinions, and the drama itself gains immensely in force thereby. The very individual interpretation of the significance of history is expressed solely through the "phantom intelligences" and their choruses.
Henry Newbolt has emphasized the differences between the choruses of The Dynasts and the Greek chorus as definitely as they can be articulated at all. He points out that the "phantom intelligences" are not visibly embodied in the play, and are therefore unconditioned by it; and that the Greek chorus, as the spectator idealized, represents either the national spirit or the universal sympathy of human nature, whereas the choruses in The Dynasts represent the author alone, and his personal philosophy. It may also be claimed that Hardy's "Pities," "Years," and "Rumors" partake more of the character of the personified abstractions of the later mediaeval morality-plays than of the comparatively real persons of the Greek chorus. However, this is only partially true. That the representation of abstract qualities was not totally unknown, even in rather early Hellenic times, can be seen in the opening of the Prometheus, in which the unwilling Hephaestus is urged on to the ugly task of chaining the Titan to the rocks by the demons "Strength" and "Force."
Comparison of the various species of supernatural intelligences in The Dynasts with similar choruses in the extant work of Æschylus leads to interesting results. There is a remarkable parallelism between Hardy's "Pities" and the chorus of Ocean Nymphs in the Prometheus, who, because of their sympathy with the suffering Titan, voluntarily suffer all his agonies with him. Both choruses are distinguished by an incomparable beauty of conception. Both are composed of minor divinities in their authors' pantheons, and are intensely human in their feelings. With their essentially tender natures subjected to a heartrending strain, they display an unconquerable loyalty to ideals, although such loyalty involves, in both cases, a revolt against the arbitrary and omnipotent power by which the universe is ruled. They thus squarely meet the severest test of true courage, and are embodiments of a most wonderful symbolic conception: that of infinite heroism coupled with infinite pity.
The Spirit and chorus of the Years may remind one of the chorus of the Argive elders in the Agamemnon, although certain differences immediately become evident. A somewhat better study could perhaps be made by comparing the "Spirits Sinister and Ironic" with the Eumenides in the play of that name. Here, however, the Greek conception is much more physical, barbaric, and unrestrained, although what we might call "intellectual savagery" is not wanting in Hardy's demons. Then, too, no hint is given as to the possible material representation of Hardy's "Intelligences," whereas we are fairly familiar, through accurate and very suggestive descriptions, with the images that were conjured up before the minds of the Athenians by the divinities of Æschylus, however crudely they may have been represented in the primitive theatre of his time.
The question of adequate theatrical presentation of the ideas treated by both writers brings us to a battlefield of art and criticism already torn and devastated by the scorching missiles of many a controversy. Let it be admitted at the outset that both dramatists are guilty of transcending infinitely in their works the mechanical stage limitations of their times. The dramas of Æschylus were in the first place conceived for the stage, however, and not for readers of literature, and the performances of them seem to have satisfied their audiences. The history of the drama shows that there is almost no limit to the imagination of an audience, if properly coaxed, in supplying the deficiencies of the theatre. Let us consider for a moment the stage-problem which the Prometheus must have presented in its day. The scene is a gigantic cleft or rock in the most desolate part of Scythia. Against this rock the Titan is suspended, nailed and bound in "indissoluble fetters of adamantine bonds." Later come the winged ocean nymphs, Oceanus himself, with his car drawn by hippogriffs, the mad heifer-maiden Io, and finally the god Hermes. Realistic presentation of such scenes is manifestly impossible, even to-day. How it was managed in the crude theatre of Æschylus must remain a source of conjecture. It is obviously a futile thing, then, to condemn the dramatic form of The Dynasts on the grounds of its impossibility as a stage-play. No play can be given with complete realism, and it is a difficult thing to set a definite limit beyond which the author must not tax the imagination. Neither the Prometheus nor the Eumenides, nor the Dynasts is a real stage-play, yet all of these have been acted with success, winning their audience by means of their inherent dramatic power and effectiveness. The Greeks did not seem to mind the fact that in the Prometheus the rock was possibly represented by some kind of wicker-work and Prometheus himself by a huge dummy, as has been conjectured, and the London audiences seem to have accepted gladly Granville Barker's ingenious conventional representation of the many dramatic "absurdities" of The Dynasts. Aristotle, with whom it is always a pleasure to agree in such things, has himself said that the power of tragedy should be felt apart from representation and actors.
The production of The Dynasts in abbreviated form at the Kingsway Theatre, London, on November 25, 1914, forms a rather unique paragraph in English stage history. It is the story of an unplayable play made playable. Hardy had already tentatively suggested in the Preface, that a performance some day might be made possible by the use of a "monotonic delivery of speeches, with dreamy conventional gestures, something in the manner traditionally maintained by the old Christmas mummers . . . with gauzes or screens to blur the outlines . . . and shut off the actual." This suggestion despite the rather apologetic manner in which it was thrown out, drew a small storm of ridicule from the reviewers, as might have been expected. Yet the actual performance proved "a success no less delightful than unlikely." A special prologue and epilogue were added by Hardy for this performance. The prologue is as follows:
Throws shade on every thoroughfare of life,
Disfigures comely countries with its gore,
And sends back mangled heroes to our shore,
The gift of gifts is sturdy hardihood,
That holds it firm through each vicissitude,
Not only hour by hour, but year by year,
If need be, till life's lurid skies be clear.
Arrested by perceptions such as this
We gather that it may not be amiss,—
During the few brief minutes you can spare,
Prom the innumerable claims that call your care
To raise up visions of historic ware
Which taxed the endurance of our ancestors;
That such reminders of the feats they did
May stouten hearts now strained by issues hid;
Therefore we have essayed to represent,
By our faint means, event upon event
That Europe saw a hundred years ago—
—What matters that Napoleon was our foe?
Fair France herself had no ambitious ends;
And we are happy in a change that tends
To make the nearest neighbours closest friends.
This is the epilogue:
And war be but a shade on memory's glass,
And might uphold the injured people's cause,
And Europe move again to genial laws;
And soon succumb all influences malign,
And still the Star of England proudly shine!
God save the King!
The prose commentary was assigned to a reader, and such lyric passages as were retained were delivered by two stately "muses." It is interesting thus to find the most feasible way of dealing with the chorus-matter to be by means of the Elizabethan induction machinery. The stage itself was also handled in Elizabethan fashion, with an inner stage for "scenes," while only properties were used on the main stage. What this performance chiefly served to bring out, besides the possibility of presenting the poem on the stage at all, was the intense dramatic quality of the scenes. At the same time, this production did not attempt, nor did it achieve, the impossible. The inevitable shortcoming of any conceivable possible performance of The Dynasts is the manifest impossibility to do adequate justice to the remarkable expression of the author's philosophy as found in the work. Nearly all of the passages recited by the muses are reported to have been taken from the sections allotted to the "Pities." Although we can imagine the effect of this procedure to have been very satisfactory, the probability is that the poem suffered a total loss of the great spiritual conflict presented by the supernatural creations of the author, which in the reading overshadows and dominates the whole of the terrestrial action. We are told in the poem that the speech of mortals should sound rather thin when heard in comparison with the chantings of the divinities. In a production where, we are told, the "Immanent Will" is hardly mentioned at all, and then only near the close, the loss of philosophical unity must have been considerable. "The vast sweep of the poem," Mr. Harold Child says, "its poetic unity, its infinite variety, its mystery and majesty, in fact all the bigness of it—these were lost. The proportions were destroyed. Man became huge and the heavens were tucked away in corners."
Scenic impossibilities have been overcome by both Æschylus and Thomas Hardy by the simplest of all means, the use of description. When the ancient dramatist cannot have the scene he wishes placed before the physical eye of his audience, he presents it to the mind's eye by letting one of the dramatis personæ describe it. This is true of the description of the setting of the Prometheus, and of the Battle of Salamis, which is reported by messenger in The Persians. Hardy's manner of portraying battles is essentially the same, except that he lets the stage directions or "dumb show" tell the story which the Athenians would have heard narrated by the messenger. In both dramatists these descriptions are intensely vivid and effective. In The Dynasts there is nothing which surpasses the following passage, dealing with the close of the Battle of Waterloo:
The reds disappear from the sky, and the dusk grows deeper. The action of the battle degenerates into a hunt, and recedes further and further into the distance southward. When the tramplings and shouts of the combatants have dwindled, the lower sounds are noticeable that come from the wounded: hopeless appeals, cries for water, elaborate blasphemies, and impotent execrations of Heaven and hell. In the vast and dusky shambles black slouching shapes begin to move, the plunderers of the dead and dying.
The night grows clear and beautiful, and the moon shines musingly down. But instead of the sweet smell of green herbs and dewy rye as at her last shining upon these fields, there is now the stench of gunpowder and a muddy stew of crushed crops and gore.
Who could wish to exchange this terrible and pitiful picture for even the most beautiful stage-set that can be contrived? The reader is reminded of a few lines in The Persians whose similarity, in idea and expression, to the close of many of Hardy's battle-scenes is unmistakable. Both poets seem to have been acutely affected by the mingled horror and beauty of a moonlight night following a battle. The very words of Æschylus cannot fail to associate the two authors together immediately:
κωκύμασιν κατεῐχε πελαγίαν ἅλα,
έως χελαινῆς νυχτὀς ǒμμ᾿ ἀφειλέτο.
It has already been mentioned that the main sources of inspiration for both writers were similar—that they both looked to the immediate historical past of their nations and found there a chronicle of glorious deeds worthy to be immortalized. Both poets wrote from the standpoint of the winning side and both believed they were recording the defeat of a vaunting and unjustified despotism. With all their intense nationalism, however, neither of them failed to be actuated at times with the keenest pity for their fallen or vanquished enemies. In The Persians the note of triumph of the Greeks is almost completely submerged in the pity and horror at the misfortunes of the oriental nation. The essential identity, both of intention and of effect achieved by both writers can be best observed in a comparison of the wonderfully vivid and gripping description of the Battle of Salamis in The Persians with Hardy's justly admired picture of the Battle of Trafalgar, in which the progress of the struggle is told in the "stage-directions" or the "dumb show." Striking superficial similarities are not lacking. Both battles show the victory of a small but compactly organized and trained naval force of a single nation over a large and unwieldy combination of ships of various nationalities. The Greeks and the English are both inflamed with a fervent patriotism and love of the democratic institutions they defend—and this spirit is in both cases represented as inspiring every man, from the admiral to the cabin-boys. Both poets also use the great national watchwords and battlecries, Hardy quoting with great effect Nelson's famous signals to his fleet, and Æschylus putting lines into the mouth of the messenger that must have drawn out all the enthusiasm the Athenians were capable of expressing on the occasion of their solemn dramatic and religious festival. Opposed to the small, confident, and high-spirited bodies we see in the one case the imperfect amalgam of French and Spanish units, under the leadership of the tragically hopeless and vacillating Admiral Villeneuve, and in the other, the vast conglomeration of Persian and countless other barbarian vessels arrayed in all their exotic and decadent splendor. In the portrayal of the losing side in both instances, we receive a vision of oriental power, pomp, and magnificence, touched with a characteristically oriental note of sadness and fatalism. Although there was as little doubt as to the outcome in the minds of the Greek audience as there is to modern readers of The Dynasts, yet the suspense is admirably sustained by both poets, and the parallel scenes can be read again and again, and retain their fascination undiminished.
Heroic characters in The Dynasts and in Æschylean tragedy present a series of most interesting Plutarchian studies and comparisons. Napoleon, as the great central figure of the modern epic-drama demands our first attention, although Mr. Abercrombie makes the very suggestive observation that the whole Napoleonic chronicle occupies a position in Thomas Hardy's work analogous to that of the single character of Prometheus in Prometheus Bound. Hardy undoubtedly set out to present Napoleon as the undisguised villain in the great tragedy of nations. This aspect of his character is the first to come to mind, and presents a direct parallel to the treatment of Xerxes in The Persians. Both are imperialists and militarists par excellence, and they go the way of all militarists in an age of budding democracy. They arouse no pity and little sympathy as their careers are unfolded, except when we get premonitory hints of the doom in store for them. At the end, however, they present truly tragic figures of fallen greatness, and commiseration is no longer withheld. Viewed in this light, Bonaparte ceases to be the pure villain and becomes, like Agamemnon, the tragic hero of the drama and the champion of his own hopeless cause against the unfeeling and resistless hand of Destiny. This impression is the one with which we are left as Napoleon makes his final appearance after Waterloo. On the other hand, instances of villainy and blackheartedness are not wanting in the poem. It is only necessary to call to mind his desertion of the remnant of the army retreating out of Russia, treated in what is perhaps the most gruesome scene in the work, and his brutal treatment of Josephine.
If Napoleon as villain and hero resembles Xerxes and Agamemnon, there is still another aspect in which he is more like the Titan Prometheus, who was gifted with foresight beyond gods and men. He often spoke of his star, and this recognition of himself as a child of Destiny makes him peculiarly fitted for a living exponent of Hardy's ideas. Both Prometheus and Bonaparte realize and advocate the claims of a higher unalterable Law against the prevailing notion of an omnipotent and benevolent Personality. As Æschylus does not hesitate to declare that Zeus himself would come to grief if he disobeyed the predestined Law, so Napoleon's Promethean vision is clearly set forth in the most critical moments of his career, at the opening of the Russian campaign and at Waterloo, where he declares himself to be moved "by laws imposed on me exorably!"
Again the female characters in The Dynasts may be compared with the women of classical tragedy. The weak and altogether pathetic figures of the two empresses, Josephine and Marie, represent the characteristic Greek attitude towards women, as childlike, rather "no-account" people.
They are in effect the only real puppets in the work, and in themselves exercise almost no influence over the main action. Essentially futile, also, is the character of Queen Louisa of Prussia. Except for his rather sentimental treatment of these women (the deathbed scene of Josephine exceeds almost anything in the novels for sheer pathos), Hardy is more typically Hellenic in his rigid subordination of female characters than is Æschylus himself. The fifty suppliant-maids, Antigone, Ismene, Atossa and perhaps also Cassandra, represent the types we expect to find in Greek tragedy and in classical literature in general, but there are no parallels in The Dynasts for the strength of will exhibited by Electra, and more particularly by Clytemnestra.
The supernatural plays a large role in most of Æschylus's tragedies and in The Dynasts. Both poets display a temperament taking a keen and naïve delight in playing with all the old machinery and tinsel belonging to the realm of the ghost-story. Dramatic use of prophecies, premonitions, ominous happenings, and similar astrological "business" is not disdained by either. There are no old-fashioned, frank, outspoken ghosts in The Dynasts, as there are in The Eumenides and The Persians, except for their occasional appearance in visions, such as the apparition of the Duke of Enghien to Napoleon before Waterloo. Both the "Shade of Darius" and the "Ghost of Clytemnestra" are invoked by Æschylus at opportune moments and act their parts without the scene to lose either dignity or dramatic effect. The same is not completely true of the scene in The Dynasts in which an enamel portrait of Marie Antoinette falls down on its face as Marie Louise of Austria consents to become Napoleon's wife. It is very dexterously explained, however, as having been caused by a natural shudder of the "Shade of the Earth" upon hearing the news. Cassandra's incoherent and blood-curdling prophecy before and during the murder of Agamemnon is paralleled by the visions and premonitions of the spirits created by Hardy. On the day of Sir John Moore's death, for instance, the Spirit of the Pities has a vision of his monument in the Garden of San Carlos.
If the excitation of the emotions of fear and pity in the audience is regarded as the ultimate aim of all tragedy, it will readily be seen how this requirement is satisfied by Hardy. At the first glance it may seem that the element of fear is stronger in Æschylus while that of pity is the dominant note in all of Hardy's work. But we must not forget the pathos of The Suppliants, of Prometheus, and of The Persians in our admiration for the skill with which the atmosphere of impending doom is evoked in the Agamemnon. Nor does the motif of terror play any minor part in The Dynasts. Perhaps the acme of "fear" of the usual tragic kind is reached in the presentation of the retreat of the Grand Army from Moscow through Lithuania and over the Beresina. There are not many effects that can equal the horror of the mad soldiers' song found in this section of the work. Aside from scenes of a similar nature, it will be observed that a note of terror is the ground-tone of the whole trilogy—and a deeper terror by far than any mere fear for the fate of the characters in a play could possibly inspire—a terror at the complete abandonment of the whole human race to its unknown and sinister destiny. It is a terror that strikes us all, concerns each individual personally, and all that he loves most in the world. The Dynasts was intended by its author not as an illusive stage-spectacle, but as a drama wherein we can see ourselves most nearly concerned. And Hardy at certain inspired moments can present it in its most ghastly aspects with overwhelming sincerity. No human feeling is quite so terrible as that of utter helplessness in the face of the unknown. But just as in reading Æschylus, one cannot emerge from the tremendous experience which a surrender of one's self to the charm of the work amounts to, without feeling that a genuine betterment and enlargement of the soul have taken place. As Mr. Abercrombie has put it:
Even more than the finest among the tragic novels, the tragic poem is full of a great pity and a great patience. It cannot comfort; but it does better. Like all great tragedy, it is "Kathartic," purging those who learn to love it of meanness and impatience and self-pity. Like all great art, it exalts and enlarges.